Stowe, Vermont
February 1957

Tick. Tick. Tick, tick-tick. Tick.

Again and again. The clock that sat on the small table next to Maria von Trapp's side of the bed continued its reliable, if maligned, prattle, keeping time. The ticking of the clock was a sharp reminder every second that time did not stand still, that it laughed in the face of those who tried to make it do so.

"Oh, Father," Maria moaned, burying her head in her hands as she sat on the edge of her bed and tried not to cry out, "please help me."

The pain inside her was so intense, she thought she might split at the seams. Wasn't she too young for this? Fourty-four was not old. She was a wife of almost twenty years, yes, but she had been young when she married her captain. And while older than most women around her when she bore her first child, she had caught up just fine, producing three more von Trapp children before her thirtieth birthday, bringing their number, as Max liked to say, to an uneven eleven.

"It suits us," Georg said to her when they were alone with their youngest, the little boy swaddled tightly in Maria's arms.

"Yes," Maria had agreed softly, preoccupied with tracing the contours of her son's face, stroking his silken head of dark, flyaway hair.

And though he had known that his wife wasn't really listening to him, then, the space of time and place showed them both just how true it was. Even if they had ever seriously entertained the idea of another child, however, it was following Matty's birth that Maria's health was placed in persistent jeopardy.

It was strain, the doctors said. Strain from injury, bodily trauma, strain from carrying four babies in five years, strain from life itself.

And so it began.

Most days, in the beginning, had been easy. Only now and then did Maria find herself doubling over in blinding pain, soon to become feverish and in need of medical attention. Now, however, years on, something plagued her in one way or another every single day.

The worst thing was the deep, sharp, stabbing pain in her sides. It made it impossible to walk, to sit, to breathe. Maria never knew how long an episode would last, or whether it would result in her needing to stay in hospital. If she were lucky, it would be a week. But usually, she was not lucky. Usually, it was a fortnight, minimum.

As a selfsame stabbing pain seared through her, Maria bent over, gasping, and choked on her own sob, already feeling too weak to call for help. She had given up on the pain medicine prescribed to her several years ago, afraid of its addictive properties. She bore the full force of her condition, and for a long time there had been no certainty about it, only that it had something to do with her kidneys slowly failing.

Slowly, painfully, Maria turned and made to lay on her bed, stretching out over the top of it, resting one hand over her belly and the other over her eyes, blocking out the light. If she focused on her breathing, and tried to sleep for a while, sometimes the pain would abate and she would wake mildly refreshed, though that reclaimed energy was often fast depleted again.

But now, this pain had become so persistent that Maria spent much of her time nauseated and trying not to vomit. Even her husband did not know the extent of it, and only saw the odd episode here and there where she woke up in the middle of the night and would involuntarily void the contents of her stomach—sometimes over the edge of their bed, sometimes in their toilet. The wheres and the hows mattered very little, except that these things happened, and that her husband was the one who cared for her in those moments.

He entered their bedroom now carrying a tray with a basin of cool water and a stack of washcloths, which was set on the bedside table nearest Maria.

Georg reached down to caress her face, then sighed, saying, "Oh, my love."

Wearily removing her hand from over her eyes, Maria groaned miserably and rasped, "It is bad, Georg."

Wordless, he gazed down at her and nodded, his face filled with such sorrow. Then, just when Maria thought she could not bear to witness his gaze anymore, he turned and began to soak and wring out the washcloths, laying them on her forehead and gently dabbing at the flushed skin that he exposed, practiced from so many hours of this task before now—in sickness and in health.

"If the flushing does not abate…" Maria trailed, unable to keep her heavy eyes open as pain stabbed her deep inside, "I feel so hot."

"I think, my love," Georg said gently, "that I must undress you, and later, put you in the bath. If your temperature rises, I will take you to the hospital."

They had long ago decided not to call the ambulance unless it was an emergency, truly. Though they were comfortable, the medical bills had become a blight in their existence, a mar on their otherwise storied life. Taking Maria himself in their own car, usually armed with a bucket and damp wash cloths, had become the habit. Georg kept a stack of blankets in the boot of the car and would make up a bed for her to lay upon, after which he would retrieve her from the house. In the first years, she had been able to walk herself, sometimes with an arm. These days, though, he usually would carry her, with doors open and shut by a son or daughter who heard commotion and ran to help.

Yes, Maria thought with a grimace to herself, she had become quite the routine spectacle to her children, unable to walk or sometimes even stand, and in an unfair turn of the tables, they were her caretakers along with her husband. They deserved so much better. He deserved so much better.

Maria couldn't even remember the last time they had spent uninterrupted time together that hadn't had the worry of disrupting the delicate balance that was her health casting a pall over it—never mind intimacy. Before, when it was easier, Maria had insisted that there were solutions that even she was aware of—for men and for women. For a time, Georg had acquiesced, but when she had three attacks in as many months, he had refused to continue, stating anxiously that it was not worth the risk, preventative measures or no. Even a diaphragm, ordered in on medical recommendation, had not been enough to convince him, and so passion grew cold.

In better stretches, Georg could be persuaded, and even seduced, but even then there was no comparison anymore to what had once been. He was too careful, so worried about causing harm. So preoccupied with monitoring her breathing and her reactions that he never really left their reality, even while deep inside her. Maria found she hated that disconnect more than the abstinence itself, so one day was the last time in a long time, and neither had noticed it until it was too late.

Suddenly, starting again was too hard, because neither could remember where they'd left off.

They shared a bed, but only for sleep.

And some sleep it was. Maria found herself back and forth between the bed and the toilet bowl several times each night at times, wracked with nausea, or there was blood in her urine, or she had no energy left and had to conserve every last bit in order to call for her husband.

He was lowering her carefully into the bath he'd drawn for her now, pressing a kiss to her forehead before he pulled away.

"Would you like me to wash you, love?" he asked gently.

Maria closed her eyes and felt her lip quiver as tears burned, threatening to leak and fall down her face. Oh, God, she did hate this. It used to be romantic, and she never hesitated, because it was a mutually beneficial act of service. But now? now, it was a reminder of how her own independence had been stripped from her, and how saying yes was never a choice but a measure between necessity and need.

The heat surrounding Maria's body as her husband washed her melted away the worst of the pain. After washing and rinsing her hair, she was able to stand, with the help of his outstretched hand, and held herself up as he wrapped her in a towel and guided her back into their bedroom, which was adjoined.

She went to sleep with her hair blissfully wet against the pillow, leaving marks of the water's presence, body dried and clothed with a light muslin nightgown. No drawers, but that meant nothing, anyway, other than skin free to breathe.

It was her frantic thrashing and moaning that woke Georg several hours later, who had fallen to sleep in the armchair in the corner of their room, and when he switched the light on, it was to find that his wife was drenched in sweat, flushed, and burning with fever.

Touching the back of one hand to her forehead, Georg made the decision immediately: he must call for the ambulance. This fever was much higher than normal. Pulling back the neck of her nightgown, he could see that her skin was hot, an angry rash of illness spreading across the expanse of her body. She had her arms wrapped around herself, and was clutched in an agonizing ball.

Pulling on his dressing gown as he raced from their room to the study, Georg dialed the hospital nearest them and explained. These days, few words were needed. Even without the ambulance rides, Maria had become a regular.

Upon return to his wife, Georg found that she was becoming delirious. He noticed that she held herself so fiercely that her fingernails dug into the skin of her arms and were causing them to bleed. He pulled her hands from them and she emitted a low, angry, twisted sound, but he refused to let go of her hands, for if he did not she might start to claw at her face or neck or some other place.

It felt like the worst eternity he had ever visited, sitting on the bed he shared with Maria and keeping her ill and crazed self from doing serious harm. She was doing nothing anyone else wouldn't do, after all—trying to escape this pain! But worse was that even as he sat here with her, having met all other requisite needs for this particular situation, he was otherwise helpless.

Worse still, there was no answer about how to make it stop. The assumption was chronic kidney disease, but if that were true, things were too erratic, too fast, too slow, too unpredictable, to make real sense. The doctors they saw knew and acknowledged this, but he supposed they thought that Maria and he would feel better if there was at least a name attached.

Georg noticed the flash of headlights in the window, grateful as he always was when the ambulance was called that their room was at the front of the house. He waited another minute or so, so perfectly attuned to the routine of the driver pulling up, parking, and the paramedics gathering their things. They knew not to knock or ring, simply to enter.

Sure enough, he heard the scraping of the door and the stomping of boots another minute later, and stood to go meet them.

They had Maria on a stretcher within moments, and he saw her loaded into the vehicle, shaking his head when asked if he would come along. She had needed supervision, so he did not have time to gather her things and his while they waited. He would do that now, he explained, and then follow in the car.

Maria usually kept a valise ready, so that he could simply grab it and go, but apparently she had never managed to repack it after the last visit. He pulled the battered leather thing from the armoire and chose a few things for them both, tossing them in haphazardly and then throwing a hairbrush, toothbrush, and a tattered little daybook that Maria kept.

The thing had seen better days, but it had traveled with her back and forth across miles and miles of hospital visits and appointments. At the close of every month, she would sit down in the study with her glasses, take up a pen, and open the book to its next clean pages. Upon those virgin leaves, she would draw the grids of a monthly calendar, number the boxes to their corresponding days, and prepare on the next pages in her loose scrawl:

Appointments
Birthdays
Symptoms
Attacks
Alcohol consumption
Menstrual cycle
Things to remember

She kept dates, times, and locations of appointments, as well as with whom, for the entire family, but as one might expect at this juncture, these appointments were mostly hers, though sometimes the girls, if they were expecting. No one was, currently.

Under birthdays she would scribble the names and dates, as well as any pertinent gift ideas, for friends and family.

The rest, however, was almost entirely to do with his wife's health. Symptoms and attacks were the places she listed in detail things like date, time of day, and supposed triggers for the attacks of excruciating pain. Alcohol consumption was almost entirely perfunctory, as the times when Maria felt well enough to indulge were scarce. She had, however, determined that type of alcohol played a role in her reaction to it, so the effort wasn't for nothing.

The next item, menstrual cycle, largely spoke for itself, but she recorded more than simply start dates of her menstruation—she also marked down intimacy, what days of her cycle flares of pain would occur, and whether she thought there was a possibility of falling pregnant. This, she noted negatively with a big, dark X, and it hadn't changed in years. Occasionally she wrote notes about their use or non-use of contraceptive measures, but again, those notes were rare.

The last item, things to remember, was not a to-do list, or if it was, it was not like one Georg had ever seen. He rarely glanced over these scrawls of his wife's, for he felt deeply that they were rather private, and that if she wanted to share these things with him, she would. And she did, sometimes. The little that he had seen of these notes were in turns full of joy and full of sorrow. Small things like "My heart soars every morning to see the sun rise over the mountaintops"—and yet, most days she slept past sunrise. That hadn't been so, before, but now? Now, the only way she saw the sunrise was if she was already awake because she never went to sleep.

And then? She cursed it.

He could not blame her. He cursed it, too.

Sighing, Georg tore his lingering gaze from the little book, and instead of shutting it in the valise, pocketed it. He would likely need to provide some information from it upon arrival. Maria had not gone to the hospital delirious since the first attacks started. Patting the pocket to reassure himself that the little daybook was there, Georg turned to the valise again and shut it, securing the latches with sharp snaps. Anything else she might need, he could bring to her once they knew more of the situation.

He left a note on the kitchen table for his children. Rosemary, now eighteen years old, was finishing her last year of school before following her brothers and sisters to university. At this moment, she slept upstairs with her siblings, and with the help of seventeen-year-old Johannes would be well able to look after fifteen-year-old Eleanore and fourteen-year-old Matthias.

Anyway, this was old news. Before Rosemary, it had been Gretl, and before that, Marta and Brigitta, and before that, Louisa. The youngest four von Trapps would worry for their mother, of course, but no more than anyone else.

It was, by now, routine.

Georg sighed, eyes unseeing as he drove along the road into the wee hours of the morning.

The next distinct thought he could perceive having was of boredom and loneliness. He had told the front desk of the emergency room staff that he was arrived, and they had promised to let him through just as soon as Maria was moved from triage into her room. It made the most sense, they all knew, because this is how it was, and it was then that the doctor would want to talk.

He provided needed information to the call nurse from Maria's daybook, and then went to choose a seat, smiling wearily at the man sitting two seats down, who was leaning onto his knees, twisting a cap in his hands. The man smiled back nervously, then went back to staring at his shoes, mumbling under his breath.

Having nothing better to do, and having by now glanced mindlessly at his watch at least twenty times, Georg began to thumb through Maria's daybook, admiring her meticulousness. It was amusing, and endearing, how she kept this so orderly despite being rather chaotic in action. On the calendars that she drew, days were marked with symbols, for which she provided a legend, using dots and stars and lines of different colors to denote different things.

Peering at the legend, Georg saw that it corresponded entirely to her lists in the pages that followed, so he studied what color was what, and for the sake of something to do, turned to the first page of the daybook and began to compare each month's calendar.

In colorful, condensed form, he saw in these pages a representation of their lives. The months more marked in red and blue made him grimace, but others, more covered in black or green marks, which denoted family events, made him smile, and it was clear looking at this book how Maria kept her head about her even when it was bad. She was not always cheerful, no, and she had every right to feel otherwise, he thought, but she stayed steady, mostly.

Turning back to the past six months, Georg studied the legend to see if she had made changes, noted the ones she had indeed altered, and began to follow the patterns of colors. The most consistent thing, he noticed, was that her cycle remained fairly dependable. When she was hospitalized, it was likely to vanish, reset, or whatever the word was, Georg assumed because of the medications and general malnutrition she endured, but when she was well…

He thought he might actually remember her saying something to that effect, that she actually looked forward to her monthly bleeding because it meant that she would stay well for a while. Sometimes that wellness was only a month, but other times it would stretch four or five months before everything went inside out and upside down again.

Curious, Georg turned back to December, the last time his wife had been sick like this, and saw that indeed, she had menstruated early in the month, and the month before that. But since then…

Brow furrowing, Georg studied January and February carefully, checking to see if he had misunderstood any notations or color coding. He turned to the pages where she kept her lists, and saw the great X she assigned to the question of pregnancy for November, December, and January. February was not yet through, so he did not expect there to be any verdict where that was concerned, as yet, and fully believed he'd find nothing there. But, as he turned to February's lists and scanned to the bottom of the second page, he saw something new.

In the place where Maria usually placed an X, instead she had penciled in a question mark, with one word below it where usually there was none: Christmas?

Georg felt the blood drain from his face. Wracking his brain, he tried to think back.

Christmas morning had dawned cold and bright, and he had come inside from gathering firewood and milking the cow to find Maria bright-eyed, practically glowing with holiday cheer as she set out the Christmas breakfast for the children, oven mitts on her hands to retrieve fresh-baked stollen from the stove.

She had kissed him warmly in greeting, and the family sat down to a delicious, scrumptious meal together. Combined with the lunch that followed shortly after noon, the entire family had decided to retire for naps, and… well, she had been feeling well, and she had insisted that the forgotten deficit of French letters wasn't a problem, and the way she had giggled and stroked away his worry, it had felt like fresh mountain air to a parched man… a bit of a miracle, really.

Thumbing back to December's calendar, Georg peered at it again and began to count. Filled with dread, he realized that if she had checked her math, she had either miscounted by mere days, or she had simply decided to take the risk. Neither option seemed particularly like her, not anymore. By Maria's count, Christmas Eve would have been the very end of the chance to fall pregnant that month, but assuming for a day or two's flexibility in these things… well, here it was. Scratched in lead with the damning evidence before him.

Shit.

"Captain von Trapp?"

Georg looked up to see a doctor standing before him in a white jacket.

"it is good you are here," the doctor said.

Georg got to his feet and cleared his throat. He reached out to shake the doctor's hand and nodded tightly.

"I must speak to you about your wife," he said gravely. "If you would follow me…"

Georg bit his tongue and followed Dr. Levin back through the doors from whence he came, knowing he would be led to the room where his wife was. In lieu of Maria being mobile enough to join the doctor in his office, they all usually congregated in her hospital room to discuss events, treatment, the way forward.

Tonight, Maria was asleep, with an intravenous vein hydrating her and a morphine drip numbing her. Georg knew they would have already administered antibiotics in the time since she had arrived and he had been brought to her, and that in a few hours a nurse would come to attach a new bag of antibiotics to Maria's saline drip and stay to monitor the transfer of fluid from bag to vein. She might comment on how well Maria was, or how her vitals were improving, but then she would go away again after making sure that the saline drip did not need to be replaced.

His wife looked pale, now, not flushed, and rather than being rigid and tense, she was relaxed in her induced slumber.

"She vomited upon arrival," Dr. Levin said quietly, watching Maria along with Georg. "It took some time to get the needle in to sedate her." He turned his head to look at the man beside him. "It's bad, this one. She'll be here at least two weeks, perhaps more."

Georg swallowed, nodded. He uselessly held up Maria's valise, then glanced around for a chair to set it upon. He saw the chair, the scratchy mockery of a wooden thing, and strode over to place their things upon it. "I'll have to bring more things. No matter," he said, his voice hoarse.

"I know you always come here hoping for the best and expecting the worst," Dr. Levin said quietly. "I'm just sorry that it works out like this more often than not, now."

Georg nodded.

"I do need to speak to you about one thing," Dr. Levin said.

Finally, the reason they must be having this consultation. Georg drew in a long breath, ready to brace himself for both the truth and the judgment.

The doctor was sorting through his clipboard now, turning through the paperwork upon it. "I thought the staff at the emergency room reception would have gathered this information for me, but it seems that the most recent dates I have as it pertains to your wife's menstrual cycle is from December." He looked up. "It's nearly the end of February now, and I know Maria is meticulous about these things, but she has not been able to tell us herself."

Mute, Georg held up the daybook, then swallowed.

The doctor looked at it, a quizzical expression upon his face. "I don't understand—"

Georg cleared his throat, then said, aware of the scratch of his throat, "It isn't missing. I just went through her notes. They aren't there."

The doctor stared plaintively, gaze questioning. "Do you mean—"

"She never forgets," Georg said, holding up the book. "Except perhaps once."

The silence between the men was deafening. Georg could hear the blood pounding in his ears. When he swallowed, his throat felt like sandpaper.

"Oh, no," the doctor said finally. "Oh, dear God, no."

Georg looked again at his wife, then removed the valise from the chair and sat there himself, burying his hands in his hair.

"There is bleeding right now," the doctor said, finally, "which is why I ask. But if she's expecting, that changes things, and we will try our best, but… Captain, I think you ought to prepare yourself for the worst."

"How long?"

"We will monitor her, and try to control the bleed, but the priority will be to keep her alive. I'm sure you understand my meaning, Captain."

Closing his eyes, Georg curled his hands into fists around his hair. In a gravelly voice he asked, "Does she know? Is there any way she knows?"

The doctor replied, "The nurses were asking after her pain levels. She said it was flank pain, that she thought there was blood. They promised to test her urine just as soon as possible, then found what she meant when they were changing her into a hospital gown, but she'd passed out by then, so they couldn't ask any more about it, and that's why I came to fetch you."

"Reading through her notes is the first I know of this," Georg said. "I think perhaps she only just came to the conclusion herself. Is there any possibility she's not… that it's just…"

He couldn't bring himself to say it.

Not unkindly, the doctor said, "We won't know, sir, until the urine samples have been tested. Even then, it might be too soon to tell."